Things To Do This Summer

“Mommy, I’m bored!” Prevent the b-word from visiting your house this summer by combing these lists of summer activities ahead of time. Hopefully you will find dozens of good ideas and enough inspiration to fill the entire season.

"Here is a list of fun things for your teen to do this summer. Print it out and give it to your teen the first time they tell you they are bored. Or be proactive and give it to them before they complain about nothing to do." Great ideas from the About.com guide Denise Witmer include inventing a new type of pizza, making a music video, having a watermelon seed spitting contest, and hosting a car wash to raise money for your favorite local charity.

Here at Backyard Nature, summer is all about the outdoors. Suggestions include listing all the trees in your neighborhood, putting out a birdbath ("It doesn't have to be a real birdbath, but could be something like a turned-upside garbage can lid.") and starting a rock collection. Most of the 101 items include educational links, so you can learn more about feathers, lichens, squirrels, bug-eaten leaves, and other fun backyard stuff.

"As much as your kids will tell you they can't wait for summer, the words 'I'm bored,' inevitably cross their lips - sometimes sooner than you think! While children do enjoy the freedom that comes with the summer months, they still like to have a little structure to their fun." So, how about writing a letter to your best friend, making dinner with your family, cutting up old greeting cards to make a puzzle, or starting a band? With 101 suggestions, there is surely something here that will capture your child's imagination.

This list from Parenting.com is written for Moms and Dads with preschoolers and toddlers. Suggestions include helping your little ones make new friends on the playground, bringing your kids' books alive with a scrapbook or a letter to the author, and mastering jump rope games with your child. One of the items even includes an iTunes playlist of "guaranteed kid-pleasers" for "boogieing down" in the living room or backyard.

Semicolon is a mom from Houston,TX who blogs about "kids and books and homeschooling and communities and sometimes movies and politics and fun links." Her very creative ideas include acting out Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, painting the Sistine Chapel on a piece of butcher block paper taped to the bottom of a table (that might take a while!), creating a math scavenger hunt, planting a flower bed and learning the alphabet in sign language. Many of the projects include links to other mommy bloggers who expand upon the activities and offer advice on how to implement them.